I work at a company called MetaLab in Victoria, BC, where I specialize in content creation and media relations. eSports have been a passion of mine since the early days of Starcraft: Brood War, and now I cover the Dota 2 scene. I've written for Huffington Post as well as Business Insider.

Reddit Reportedly Banning High-Quality Domains

Within the past 24 hours, user-contributed link aggregator reddit.com compiled a “secret list” of banned domains—including such reputable news sites as The Atlantic, Business Week, PhysOrg and ScienceDaily. But the controversy doesn’t end there.

Reddit user and moderator violentacrez brought the issue to light in a post titled, “Reddit is now banning entire high-quality domains, using an unpublished list”

“reddit admins enabled a new feature where links from domains on a secret list cannot be posted, even by moderators, even in their own reddits.”

Reddit is a site that claims to be all for online democracy and transparency. This abrupt act of censorship has triggered a response from users—and the upset is gaining momentum by the second. When Alexis Ohanian was fully involved with reddit, he talked about how the users themselves had the right to vote up or down any articles. In the truest sense of democracy, everything was moderated by the community themselves. Deeper than that, each subreddit has its own set of moderators to curate submitted links within their own community. The notion of denying the free press access to a high-volume audience is a relatively new and disturbing development in reddit’s previously open culture. The community itself needs to take steps to make sure reddit doesn’t turn itself into a tyrant, or a “police state” website.

Some domains are not allowed on any part of reddit because they are spammy, malicious, or involved in cheating shenanigans. Attempting to submit a link to one of these domains will now fail with an informative error message.

We’re initially rolling this out for link shorteners which have long been discouraged on reddit as they conceal the true destination of the link.

There is much irony in mainstream news sites being banned by a site that’s been such a strong part of the anti-SOPA movement. It’s ironic as well to prevent news from being seen as it happens on one of the most-read sites on the internet.

One of the reasons behind the censorship is that it isn’t being seen by reddit staff as censorship. The banned domains have been linked to accusations of reddit users “gaming the system,” or having financial ties to the promoted links. “Spamming” and “Cheating” were the catchwords for getting these site-wide domain bans in place—but this so-called spam differs vastly from the typical junk you see floating around the “new” section that is downvoted by users, featuring sketchy domain names and topics ranging from cheap prescriptions to racy photos of Bollywood celebrities, etc. Cheating, refers to hammering “fake” upvotes from bots on a network of proxied IP addresses, sometimes allowing the submitted link to reach the front page without the curation of real reddit users.

There is talk within the reddit community of the possibility of “faking” evidence of spam in order to take down, say, Condé Nast’s competitor sites.

Erik Martin, aka hueypriest, gives a light confirmation that the bans are only temporary. After reading his comment, I reached out to him to get a better sense of his definition of temporary, and was told that it’ll be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

As a response, I feel the vagueness of the “case by case” response could mean that the best-case scenario for these publications is that their ban is lifted, but the worst-case scenario could mean a permanent ban for those sites found guilty of violating reddit’s terms of use.

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I totally don’t agree with Reddit banning any sites–it only punishes people who are genuinely interested in submitting content they find captivating, and the whole point of Reddit is the you can upvote or downvote what you like or don’t like. Also, I know accounts have been banned for “spam” even though they were totally genuine accounts–sometimes it seems like the community policing gets way out of hand there, which is disappointing because honesty is the whole concept they’re promoting.

Greg, if you go to the Reddit front page history from a year ago, you’ll see the domains that were most often on the front page. And you’ll see which ones got dinged as “spam”. It tells the story for you.

Why would a site like the Atlantic need to spam? They consistently provide quality content. If anyone from the Atlantic or any other such “banned” site would like to post links to Hubski, by all means…

The people who told Forbes that those “domains” were gaming are not being truthful. This censorship has been going on for at least a year, and their own spam department would tell the mods “that is not spam” but the mods would put it in their secret file and train it as spam so that it wouldn’t show up. The domains they did this to were the domains that hit the front page the most often (not Conde Nast publications).

When I asked why my subs weren’t going through, the “moderators” told me not to sub certain domains because “others who sub them are spammers.” That logic didn’t hold water with me. How is it a domain’s fault if a “spammer” subbed them, and why is it that Reddit’s own spam department did not agree with the moderators? The moderators told me they were “powerless” to ban the spammers because they had “high karma”. I was told by moderators what domains they “encouraged” me not to sub. That was it for me. Censorship much?

Their SOPA stance is beyond hypocritical, but no one can accuse them of not monetizing their corporate-agenda community. It really changed after they spun off into their own corporation.

I’ve been a reddit user for years. I know that the spam filter exists, and know that all domains behave differently in various subreddits.

I did not say that these sites were in fact gaming the system—I was pointing out the accusations of it. Sure, there are folks at these companies that pay a staffer to push content for pageviews, but to punish them without warning is alarming.

The fact of the matter is that the spam filter system is completely and utterly broken. Innocent sites, be it an independent web comic artist, or a national news corp, are being submitted organically, only to be met by that fickle spam filter.

The community at large is being punished, being disallowed to view potentially breaking news, as it happens. With the volume of sites out there, reddit serves as a one-stop-shop for a personalized browsing experience. Banning big, high quality sites takes away from the overall experience.